BIG LETTERS! YOU DO NOT NEED TO START A NEW WORLD FOR THE FROZEN FACTORY, OR FOR ANY PATCH EVER!

Hate reading? Got your wallet at the ready? [url=http://store.steampowered.com/app/443691/]Purchase the Expansion Pack here!, 10 months and 10 patches ago, FortressCraft left Early Access. Since then, I've been regularly adding free content to the game. If I had my way, I'd be releasing free content forever, but, sadly, I have 2 fluffy cats that demand only the finest in cheap catfood, so here we are - the first paid-for expansion pack for the game! Before I get onto the expansion, let's review what everyone's gotten over the last 9 months a bit - you might be surprised at the things you thought were always there.. I know I was!

Patch 2

• Organic Solar Panels
• Advanced Conveyor Filters
• Tunnel Nukers
• Threat Calmers and Agitators
• Conveyor Slopes
• Unity 4.6
• Polish and fixes!
• Organic Batteries

Patch 3

• Floating Combat Text
• Snowmen!
• CryoGenic hoppers and Organic Recombination
• Clumsy mode
• T0 LPTs
• Polish and fixes!
• Ore Extractor Auto upgrading of Drill Heads
• DLC #1 - The Dapper Pack

At this point, I'd kinda finished polishing the enormous amount of content available at release, and work began in earnest in moving the game forwards.

Patch 4

• T2 Ore Ping graphics
• MK4 and MK5 Induction Kits
• Motorised Conveyors
• Skins!
• Armour Piercing and Imbued missiles!
• Coal Enricher
• Plasma Imbued Cutter heads
• AFK Mode
• Dynamic texture loading
• Server Monitor
• Tactical View

Patch 5

• Moved to Unity 5
• Added threaded visbility
• These gave 40%-400% framerate boost!
• Minecarts!
• Signs!
• Zipper Merge!
• Overminds!
• Orbital Strike Controllers!
• DLC #2 - The Skin Pack
• Added new aesthetic blocks
• Made Frozen Factory items available for the first time
• Added MK2 grappler
• Added worms and hivemind kill rewards

Patch 6

• Spider Bot weapons and base
• FALCOR loot collection robots
• MOD Support
• Added the Nova
• WorkFloor Excavators

Patch 7

• Cargo Lifts
• Scanning of Storage Hopper
• 3 new Matter Movers
• Usable ARTHER Power Cores
• A complete new resource tree : Resin Handling
• MK2 Organic Solars
• Added the Crashed Parts container
• Added minecart logic gates
• Added Casual Mode

Patch 8

• Ore Thief
• Induction Charger
• Slime Attractor
• Coal Infuser
• Empty Fuel Canister machine
• Steel Bar, Advanced and Imbuied crafters, to allow automation
• Glowsticks now colourisable for Dapper owners!
• Inventory sorting
• ARTHER Power Bar

Patch 9

• Mission System
• Improve mod support
• Massive rebalance of early and mid-game progression
• Faster movement on Reinforced Blocks!
• Mass Storage rework and IO ports!
• World Seeds!
• Base Power Bar
• Hopper Emptying Inventory Storage Transporter (H.E.I.S.T.) machine
• BarKeeper

Every patch also contained endless balances, optimisations, polish and help file updates! But what you really want to know is - what's new? As well as the Frozen Factory stuff (which I'll cover later), I've been playing through the game, and paying special attention to boring, tedious, grindy and downright rubbish parts of it. So here's your regular Patch 10 notes. ;)

• Added a completely awesome new skin to the Skin Pack.
• Added /YourCraft - type this in the chat system to swap your mouse button to match the 'other' voxel building craft game.
• Added Construction Paste and a Construction Paste Grinder. ALL Reinforced and Aesthetic Blocks now use Construction Paste. This should mean you only need to carry around ONE slot's worth of material, and you can now craft any pretty you like with it! This can be hooked up with the new super-efficient Garbage Thief to make your base prettification and defences super-easy! This will save you around TEN inventory slots.
• Major rebalance to Casual Mode. Details in the main page, but crafting machines, power usage and lab research are all now lightning-quick on this mode, and MK3 lasers are cranked to double damage! I'm still not 100% happy with this - it's designed for streamers and parents, really, and the idea is that you can charge the OET in a weekend's worth of hard play. I suspect it'll continue to be rebalanced as time goes on, but I'd love to hear feedback!
• Crystal Cutter Heads have had a major boost
• Ore Extractors now tick more often, for less ore. This is the same Ore-Per-Minute, but means you shouldn't get overwhelmed with a massive chunk of ore all in one go.
• Ore Vein clearing is now substantially faster with higher-tier motors. You're welcome.
• Added the Care Package. When you build your C5, any new worlds you start will optionally give you ALL the suit upgrade immediately. This should make for MUCH more pleasurable starts to new games for veterans. This includes the MK3 grapple gun and the All-In-One suit upgrade.
• Added some secret DD, Shadow and FPS bars. (Top right - FPS is red, Draw Distance is Green and Shadow is Blue. Middle == fine. Right of centre == too high (YAY YOU), left of centre == too low (Your PC is struggling)
• Added Alloyed Machine Block Assembler. This creates alloyed blocks from 16 gold, 16 Nickel and 16 Titanium. Added alternative crafting recipe for MK3 batteries that uses Alloyed Machine Blocks. This should automatable by regular human beings now.
• Souped up LPT and Research Pod storage

Most of the focus this month, obviously, has been on the Frozen Factory Expansion Pack. Now, if you want to just have it all as a surprise, then purchase the Expansion Pack, and get on with it!

So what does the Frozen Factory contain?

I'll give a brief rundown of all the machines in it. The best-usage of these machines, of course, is down to you!

• MK3 Grapple and Build Gun. Immune to cold effects. Super fast
• Larger Player Suit Battery
• All-In-One suit upgrade - free up those Inventory Slots!
• Added Chromed Lenses. 1600 PPS from a MK3. Awww yeah.
• FlatLand. Requires killing a CryoPlasm Spawner
• Added the Care Package. When you build your C5, any new worlds you start will optionally give you ALL the suit upgrade immediately. This should make for MUCH more pleasurable starts to new games for veterans. This includes the MK3 grapple gun and the All-In-One suit upgrade.
• Bulk Cargo Lift
• Bulk Minecart
• Tier4 MatterMover - 4800 items per minute!
• IO Ports for Mass Storage
• Conduits. Link together 2xT4 batteries at a range of 128m. Balancing happens at 10,000 PPS.
• Slow and Poison missiles. These things are lethal.
• Cold Cavern Climate Control Centre; now with emergency CryoPlasm defence!
  
• 3 versions of the new Ore Extractor; the Trencher. 54 cubic metres of Ore-Collecting glory.
• Blast Furnace - 3 seconds to slagify ore.
• Continuous Casting Basin - capable of cooling 4 slagged ores into bars simultaneously!
• GeoThermal Plant and ancillary items - feed this pipes and it'll use the difference between the Cold Cavern and the Magma Cavern to generate FREE power! (Feed it Freezon Canisters in order to boost its output by 20x!)
• Hard Rock Grinder, to allow you to progress onto a new tier of ores.
  
• Particle Filters, Compressors, Gas Storage and Bottlers. These are a completely new style of resource collection, and you will be building them in the Cold, Toxic and Magma Caverns.
• The ultimate drill; The MagmaBore. 87120 cubic metres of glorious machine, designed to drill down into the Magma Caverns and collect liquid Magma.
• Magma Storage unit can hold Magma from the MagmaBore, and pass it along to the...
• CryoInferno. Maintain burnage on a CryoPlasm Spawner for 15 minutes and it'll no longer cause you any problems.
• Lots of CyroDefence! Lancers, Burners, CryoMines, FALCOR Bombers (these are ace), Melters, and the completely LETHAL (yet achievement-giving) Dazzler.
• Freezon Injector - used to soup-up the Lancers at end-game.

I'm afraid that the new surface defences and the Ore Washer didn't make it in; I'll try and get those done for Patch 11 (End of July).

There's going to be questions on 'How do I get the T4 stuff?' and 'How should I play?', so I'll touch on those.

Regardless of anything else, you'll need to locate Chromium and Molybdenum, and plonk down a Hard Rock Grinder on a 3x3 area, and collect your first ores by hand. I hope you feel dirty, having to carry ore by hand. Ugh.
Can't find a flat 3x3? A small explosive charge should help you here! To process these first few ores, you'll need to use an ARC Smelter upgrade. This is crap. This is really crap - but it lets you process just enough T4 ores to build your Trenchers and then your Blast Furnace and Continuous Casting Basin. Pretty much, the base game, from your first research to discharging the OET in a blaze of orbital glory, remains unchanged if you have the expansion or not. As indicated at the start of this post, there is a metric ton of improvements, balance changes and brand-new, free machines that have made the game significantly smoother, easier to play. I haven't entirely taken the 'Warcraft' approach, however, and if you have the Frozen Factory, you'll find you can utilise some of its early-progression items to make the final part of the Vanilla game much easier. I highly recommend, tho, that you try and clear down the surface attacks via the Orbital Strike Controllers before attempting to conquer the Cold Caverns. That said, Geothermals provide a /lot/ of power, and power is usually the limiting factor in charging your Orbital Energy Transmitter. I've found that progressing onto Geothermals and Particulates but NOT trying to achieve much in the way of Cryo Defence works well. You are, of course, running the risk of being overwhelmed by the CryoPlasm. If you want to play it SAFE - and remember, Safe and Slow are usually opposites - then clear down the surface, charge the OET 4 times, destroy all the Hiveminds, THEN move on. The quickest way, however, is probably to tech rush to 5 or so Freezon-Boosted Geothermals, and shunt that power to the surface via Conduits. However, at the end of the day, there a great number of 'best solutions' to this problem, and I sincerely hope that you find your very own best way. I dislike it when there is one solution that is overwhelmingly the best. The particulate system are interesting. I didn't want to require a new world from you, so I had to come up with ways to generate resources that DON'T rely on existing stuff. The solution was the Particle Filters. These constantly collect Freezon, Chlorine or Sulphur for you, depending on if you built them in the Cold, Toxic or Magma caverns. A quick note on setup; for MAXIMUM efficiency, you'll want 16 Particle Filters connected to 4 Particle Compressors, connected to 1 Gas Storage, connected to 1 Gas Bottler. That's a 'complete' system (Handy hint : there's a 5th connection UNDERNEATH the Gas Storage and Compressor!). You'll be using these compressed canisters all over the place to boost machines. There's a similar setup for the smelting; use 4x Blast Furnaces to run 1x Continuous Casting Basin flat out. You'll probably be building several of these for maximum ingots!
And, of course, the elephant in the room; the CryoPlasm. Now, if you've played CreeperWorld (as you should! It's great!), you might think all this seems a bit familar. And you'd be right. About 80% of the way through this expansion pack's development, I realised that the CryoPlasm acted rather like the Creep, and the defences acted rather like theirs... so I'm exceptionally proud to announce that this is the 2nd EVER game to be 'Tower defence vs Fluid'. Genuinely tho, any inspiration was definitely sub-conscious - but damn is it fun, as well as very challenging. You've got an incredible array and variety of defences against the CryoPlasm. I've listed them above, but I'd really rather let you find out the best way to defend; I suspect it'll be the subject of a great number of heated Forum debates. I will say one thing - building a wall does NOT work. The CryoPlasm will 'prefer' to go through air... if it can't, it'll PREFER to go through rock. But if it can't, it'll go right through Reinforced blocks. You're not Donald Trump. Build guns, not a wall. Think big.
Other than that, play through, have fun, give feedback! A word of warning - the CryoPlasm seems a tad... unpredictable. Sometimes it just tears through the cold caverns at a horrific and terrifying rate. At others, it just seems to hang around and ignore you. I suspect it's world-dependent, so you may get wildly differing behaviours. I'll be continuing to balance, polish and generally improve FortressCraft for the foreseeable future. I will not purely focus on Frozen Factory items, but will do stuff across the entire game. Thank you all for supporting me and following this game over the last 10 months. I very much hope to continue developing the game, adding more content to T1-3 and T4, to start on the Adventures Pack, and to work towards T5, Nuclear Reactors, Rocketry and Orbital SpaceStations. For now tho - go get some of the new achievements!

[ 2016-07-11 16:55:03 CET ] [ Original post ]